2 year+ check-in: My broken foot is a (mostly) distant memory

I broke my foot back in late 2015 and now 2018 has just begun. So… do I still think about my once-broken foot and does it affect me?

The answer is a little yes, but mostly no.

The truth is, everything has been pretty much fine with my foot once I got rid of the plantars fasciitis that set in after I first started walking again. I blogged about getting it here and fixing it here, but it hasn’t come back since I got that resolved with simple shoe inserts.

That’s not to say, however, I’ve forgotten about my broken foot, even after all this time.

Sometimes when I am walking barefoot, I can feel a tinge of something where my foot is broken — somewhere between discomfort and pain, but very minor. I can easily recreate the pain my shifting my weight to the outside of my foot and onto my fifth metatarsal.

I can reproduce much more pain if push on my baby toe, however. A hard push on my left baby toe does nothing, but the same hard push toward the top of my right foot hurts enough that I need to stop immediately. Still to this day, it just hurts to bend my baby toe.

I suspect I will always have that pain, but I can just live with it. I can’t speak to whether using surgery and screws and all that would’ve prevented it. My break wasn’t perfectly aligned, as you can see in my x-ray photos, but my doctor felt it was quite close and surgery wasn’t necessary.

One of the most noticeable things as I was trying to get back to normal, as I mentioned previously, was the balance in my right foot was terrible after I got back to walking normally. I could stand on my left foot and, ya know, just stand there. But on my right foot, I would wobble and the muscles in my foot would jerk all around trying to keep me in place. I eventually would fall out of place, whereas on my left foot I could stand there forever. It was pretty crazy how obvious and different it was.

I went to a doctor for a check-up on my foot, who gave me exercises to strengthen my foot and improve my balance. But much like when I took piano lessons or was in school, I didn’t do my homework. Instead, eventually over time this has just seemed to resolve itself. I do think I still balance better on my left side if I stand on one foot, but I can stand on my right foot now.

Sometimes I get people visiting this blog who are in the thick of their broken foot and they are typically, well, quite miserable and quite frustrated. I sympathize. It was a depressing for few weeks after my foot broke. But I can say, once you get past it, you pick up where you left off, get back to normal and you start to forget how much it sucked.

So, that’s it. After you break your foot, you might get plantars fasciitis. Your balance will probably be bad in your formerly broken foot. And you may always have a little bit of pain at the break site. But life moves on.

Here’s to 2018 and no broken bones.